Getting Your Feet Wet with Google Shopping Feed Rules

Google Merchant Center has recently rolled out an awesome new feature called ‘Feed Rules’. Feed Rules makes the transition from your inventory management system to your Merchant Center feed quick, seamless, and increasingly automated (especially if you are utilizing the API).

Basically, Feed Rules takes unsupported product data and transforms it into supported data, such as “Golf Equipment” (unsupported) to “Golf” (supported). Up until now, you would have had to make the change from “Golf Equipment” to “Golf” manually. With this exciting new feature, what could there possibly be to worry about?

Before I continue, I need to ask…Is it possible that you are not using shopping campaigns at all? Did you know that shopping campaigns have higher CTRs and better conversions than regular text ads for selling products? In other words, you are leaving money on the table if you are not using shopping campaigns. OK, now that that’s out of the way, we can move on.

As with any new feature, I’m always wary of going all in before testing first. The last thing that I want to happen is to erroneously create a rule that could ruin my feeds, destroy my CTR, drive up costs, mess up my ads, bid on the wrong search terms, or any other apocalyptic ending!

So (now that I have shared with you my innermost thoughts and fears), what I am going to do is test a “less important” feed with less traffic, instead of testing my best performing category. My intention is to keep my test small, thus keeping mistakes to a minimum. Next, I’m going to create my rules and upload my feed. I’m done now, right?

Well, almost…

I still have to check my feed for errors. I’ll fix any that exist, and then let my ads run.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to monitor my AdWords account and look for any dramatic or unexpected changes in my stats such as CPA, CTR, CPC, or impressions.

Pro tip: Avoid running ad tests at the same time as a Feed Rules tests. You will lose the ability to benchmark your data.

Once you are confident that you won’t destroy your feeds, it is time to apply this across all of your feeds. Just make sure that you are monitoring your feeds and AdWords account for mistakes.

Pro tip: Make use of the AdWords previewer, this will help you to spot check your ads.

Could your business benefit from Shopping campaigns, but you are unsure of where to start? Would you like to learn how to setup and run a Shopping campaign like a pro? Learn how to get more conversions by registering for our live Google Shopping Campaigns course here. You’ll get a Google certified instructor giving you hands on teaching in Shopping campaigns. Register now before the class fills up.